Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

  He watched Sidney behind the cash register standing and watching him back as if he might be a common shoplifter. To his left in the mouth of another aisle, Mortimer walked out from his own shopping with a sea gaff in his hands.

  “You know John Roman, Mr. Mortimer?” Sidney began, strangely formal. “He’s a veteran. Wounded. One of our brave ones from the lost battles.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard. And he dates white women, I’ve heard. I have knelt on my knees at the graves of such white women. Is your name Ramp?”

  “No. John Roman.”

  “All right. Guess my name.”

  “I know it. You’ve stood five feet from me.”

  “Death by sea or death by mother. Morte de Mer or Morte de Mère. Merman, seaman, see. Did anybody tell you I now own a big piece of this store, John? Your feet are walking on my—”

  Sidney began to protest. “N—”

  “Oh for pity’s sake, sit down, Sidney. I was just going on.”

  Sidney seemed relieved and did sit down on his proprietor’s high stool, a swivel chair new to his regime, fairly swank. He immediately jumped up and out in the air, screaming, holding his bottom. He pulled his hands from behind. Tiny points of blood on them. He held three or four map tacks.

  Mortimer squalled, “He fell for it! Fell for it!”

  Sidney grinned.

  Who were they? What was this?

  Roman thought they were like two little brothers. Who was leading who? His stomach turned. He drew off one of the ancient dusty cellophaned white handkerchiefs from a snap display and handed it over the counter to Sidney, who began eating off the wrapper and getting the cloth out with his teeth and fingers. A kid, a not unhappy kid in an old boyhood-prank cutabout. Buckwheat, Spot, Spanky. The other freckled goony-haired one. Alfalfa with centerparted hair, cross-eyed a lot. These two men were brats, that’s what they were. They were neighborhood bullies. I took three shots to the collar and jaw for them and their recesses.

  The tall one with rock-and-roll hair was still holding on to that fish gaff, that shark gaff. What is the verb. The word? They are in collusion. Noun, I guess. Roman walked down the front steps with his new jigs and good minnows. Various geezers, Ulrich among them, were bunched at the base of the steps having at it.

  “What was we looking at?” one said.

  “The mother lode of weird,” said another customer.

  Ulrich was in a bomber jacket with fleece and it eighty-five. He was real.

  “Bad news with big preacher hair on it.”

  “I don’t know what that cocksucker was. But this old fist would be his watch-out if he chanced to come close to me.”

  “That man was crossbred with Lazarus.”

  “That cut-up preacher?”

  “I seen him before.”

  “Said he ain’t said word one. Like he talked to a devil.”

  “You don’t see nothing like that twice. But we did. That old boy in the Edwards football-game lavatory.”

  “He seen maybe an unclean spirit, like.”

  “Or trying to exorcise one, like.”

  “You here one day and Stagger Lee cut off your face the next.”

  “Or your head like Pepper. We ain’t never finishing talking on that one. Your hotshot sheriff wandering around like a mascot.”

  Ulrich in the moth-eaten bomber jacket, the corduroy trousers much too big now in this skinnier madness, spoke again. “Spiders hold the altitude record for earth-bound creatures. Mount Everest.” He seemed on the verge of tears, then was over it. “Up there above the murder of men, these fine little creatures. Their thin legs. Having their families. Those delicate eggs. The winds must howl and howl outside.”

  Roman was sorry he had not gone straight to fishing, but these were fine minnows. He might seine his own, keep a little pool of them behind the house. He headed off to his car.

  When the fishing was over, he would be glad and sorry both to return home to Bernice. She was suddenly an old sick woman like Harvard’s Nita, and he felt just paces behind him, unable to drag her back from the maw of huge nonsense ahead.

  The spider of Ulrich, he considered abruptly. Wind howling on the jagged mountaintop. Their little legs. Shuh. Down between them rocks. Icy winds the only weather, only world. Get aholt of something heavy, don’t never quit. New babies coming, feel the wind outside their shells already. Get born a half foot from ruin between a rock and another rock.

  When you knew death was not far off, you always got a strange arrangement of the usual facts. You almost saw the spirit itself. An essence of the familiar, shifted. Sound, smell, dirt, sky. Thirty-three years ago, three times he had left where a sniper’s bullet struck seconds later. Then on a hot afternoon he had known the strangeness but was weary and, he knew now, curious. He had made no move and gotten shot.

  Roman hummed around the remnants of a tune. “Time After Time,” Chet Baker’s version of airy sweeter days. He kept a pistol in his kit for snakes, but he knew he didn’t need that much caliber. You lived long enough, mildly on the lake. That was the plan. Nothing greedy or hungry about it, hardly even a dream. Now some sullen force came in to take away this small existence. No harbor. Us small craft, cracked against the wall by mean winds. Now he realized he had bought the pistol for men and lied to himself about it. Men in this new newspaper headline shoot-out, even on the school yards. How many niggers drove down a road like this to die fifty or a hundred years ago. They’d looked wrong, they’d whistled like wolves, they’d voted.

  If, say, some fool in a smoked-glass car came up beside him running parallel and wouldn’t stop it, kept looking at him, he would pull the gun and fire a magazine through the glass. Death worked on Bernice at home. Here, Whoever, here’s some for you too. He had changed and hated his changes.

  Pastor Egan lay silent. The other patient was watching a television show about a hospital as he lay there in the hospital. Maybe he wasn’t convinced enough he was truly here. Egan knew better. His inner voice had just returned and he liked himself again.

  Episcopals, your rituals are babble, it muttered. Robed baboonery. Lukewarm, I spit them from my mouth, even while loving them and their gold and whiskey and cable-knit sportswear.

  You are postwar, postmodern, posthuman. You sweep up, is all. The waste of the stores and storerooms find their place in each consumer heart to rot and reek. You are lukewarm, my people, my people. No decisiveness. Saith I the pastor. The man who owes thousands to the pimp who butchered him. Something large is in the woods. Not what you planned. You have not decided, so the thing in the woods is deciding.

  TEN

  IN THE PAWNSHOP WHERE THE SAXOPHONE RESTED IN its velvet-lined dark alligator case, Max Raymond had not been as misled as he supposed. His nemesis Malcolm, the afflicted past lover of Mimi Suarez, had gone by the window. He knew where Raymond was and intended to have a showdown with him but was in no way connected to the red Mercury Sable. He was looking for a weapon, probably a twelve-gauge double, when he missed the pawnshop and was led on by another rank of pawnshop signs down the way. He’d turned into an alley by mistake, tired from hitchhiking down Highway 61. Seven different rides and a grinding wait in all weathers, October going hot, cold, rainy and balmy, freezing. He could not drive, and his old gang did not approve of his pilgrimage.

  Malcolm walked out of the mouth of the alley after Raymond had followed the car. Had he bought fast and, leaving Raymond dead behind him, taken the man’s car, he would have arrived at the house with Mimi Suarez away visiting relatives and singing in Miami. Neither he nor Raymond had seen the other. But they never lived a day without the other on their minds. In the next pawnshop was a more comprehensive collection of guns, and in this state of enormous sympathy for gun owner and hunter, where the legislature has even designated a specified season for dwarfs to hunt deer with crossbow, he found sympathy surrounding him on all sides. The pawnshop owner wanted stroke victims armed for whatever.

  In the shop were the Ten Hoors and many bigger, meaner orphans
and the now fifteen-year-old girls. It was not just a summer camp anymore. It was also less announced what it was now. They were not survivalists, nor religionists, nor paramilitary exactly. They needed guns, ammo, water and canned goods, barbed wire, and already had dynamite and four live grenades from the National Guard. The percussion kind, which they needed more of. You could add shrapnel to the outside of these very easily in the shop. The couple and the others liked Malcolm instantly and they had a much better gun for him. He left with them, he who was skimping on food to buy the twelve-gauge.

  Carl Bob and Ulrich imagined they had a temporary grand theft going when they started up the luxurious pontoon launch that Harvard had conceived and largely built for Melanie Wooten and sailed it directly across the lake to preach to the orphans. But it was part Ulrich’s already by original charter, and the keys stayed in it all the time. The men were senile, sometimes raving and unkempt, but Ulrich had handled the launch several times before, and he did pilot well and knew the lake better than Harvard. Also he had no fear of water, although he would forget whether he could swim or not. Carl Bob Feeney simply couldn’t. He wore a fair barrel of life-preserving with two jackets, one in front, the other on his back. You couldn’t have held him under with a semi wheel rim and chains.

  They plowed. This vessel required patience, although the Mercuries were powerful and magnificent. Patience and meditation were what it was all about. They had brought their own sermonettes to read when the orphans got aboard.

  Ulrich would talk about the white teeth of animals, especially those of the lesser creatures. The traveling was perfect in late October, the sky orange-lit at midafternoon. The trees along the shore were still green, but a few were on fire in that incandescence born of lush summers, fat sopping roots.

  Forgive us, little children, he rehearsed, he prayed. Our long years on this earth are an obscenity. They carried pictures of McJordan, the Jackson policeman notorious for shooting two smallish dogs, with a red X across his face. They had had it done at a LazerPrint in Vicksburg owned by an angry animal lover.

  Ulrich wished he could sing, write songs and sing, but mainly just sing. So much so long in his bosom that could have been shared and vented to his auditors through the years. They would have liked him instead of fleeing. He wished he could sing all out, in a long exquisite howl for the animals and flight, but he was just croaking here and taking a nose hit now and then from his oxygen bottle. He had heard a story of a man, Roy Orbison, who sang so beautifully that he turned permanently pale. He wore nothing but black and dark sunglasses to memorialize his grief over his wife and children dying in a fire. That was a wonderful fate, thought Ulrich. He wanted to be pale and a bird with a deep throat. The animals would elect him their tongue.

  We will have a ceremony in gratitude to the animals and then I’ll kill myself, he decided. Carl Bob Feeney bore straight ahead with his stare at the far shore, trying to piece together any orphans’ tableau on their pier that might be ready for them. He could not see well, though, and he was looking at a crowd of heifers with buzzards over them and trying to figure. Carl Bob loved the launch as his, an almost bold late gift to his years on the land with his dogs and cats. Loved his nephew, Byron Egan, a prince of the spirit, a boon relative. Blessed his sister, Egan’s mother, for providing him against this darkness. Sometimes old Feeney forgot he was not still a devoted Roman Catholic. And sometimes he felt he was a whole torn country, afire in all quadrants.

  A greyhound, alert to kindness, stood next to Melanie on the pier. It was a gift from Facetto. They had come out after loving and discovered the two ancient loonies had taken the launch. They called Harvard, and he was a little concerned but said gruffly that he did not care to come down to the pier if the sheriff was there. He told Melanie, she thought bitterly, that it was consuming all his care to watch his beloved wife of all these years slowly slipping away. He had begged her not to smoke, to exercise, to eat better. So here they had the results of another individual, fully warned, taking her own road in mild spite against the odds in the newspapers. Betting on Harvard University upsetting Alabama in football. Oh, to be holding her hand again when they were twenty-three! Melanie said that sounded right and it made her cry.

  She hung up the phone, bereft and held in the sheriff’s arms at the same time. She had never disgusted anyone before.

  In their haste to renounce Melanie, the pier crowd did not notice that their cheerleader looked better than she had since middle age. The evidence was that she was reclaiming middle age right now, however briefly, and enjoying it backwards. A smile on some old women does not become them, and they look macabre in their glee. Not so Mrs. Wooten. She was backlit, it seemed, into severe blond on a blue field. She had admirable teeth, for one thing. But the sheriff was drawn and bag-eyed, more like a throttled immigrant at the turn of the century than the video lecturer. Some did now mock him for his race. They weren’t used to Sicilians except around the Gulf Coast, and he was noted as Mafia-eyed by several older viewers, as well as lying fool, for his failures to indict or even locate the killer of Pepper Farté and the butcherer of Frank Booth and Pastor Byron Egan. These people did not fear his wrath or respect his office. Sheriff Facetto despised being unpopular too. For the main part he had acted himself into this job and had intended to grow rapidly in office.

  Melanie and Facetto. Love and despair go hand in hand. Sleep in the same bed. In full light she was not confident of herself, but she could not know Facetto was gone in love for her much deeper than appearances. The love was ruining him, he slept with her soul and never got enough of it. What lines bred Melanie? They ought to store the blood in a safe. He was twice in love with her just for lasting.

  She studied the large bent dog. Its face made her think of T. S. Eliot’s famous line, “some infinitely gentle, / infinitely suffering thing.” It was an emeritus of the tracks in West Memphis, where Deputy Bernard had confiscated it from a man who had abused it. For Facetto, the greyhound stood for something. What else could comfort this startling creature better than another startling creature, with eyes haunted as if alarmed by its own creation. He gave it to be there in his absence from her.

  “When I come back, I want you to’ve named our dog. We don’t know it. You’ll be at the door of your house and tell me the name, and then drop your gown and I’ll get on my knees.”

  “Sweet man.”

  He thought he knew his killer now and cutter too. It was long quiet work, but he would have him soon. Bernard had seen something and a church trombonist had seen something. But Facetto’s memory of their last acts was driving him around the bend, riding his Melanie to the tune of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” on the stereo in the next room. She was taken by several supreme moments, a happy crisis she did not know as a possibility. She was sad after the outflow and wept deeply in gratitude. He said he needed to bring her home good news and wouldn’t return until he did. Then he was gone.

  Melanie was very weary of what regular people thought. Their thoughts began to hurt and make her weak. Come let me be your grandmother harlot or whatever it is I’m called. Let me be the source of dissension. I never knew Ben Harvard loved me. But fine, fine—let me serve as not only sin but evil around here. I meant to be a scandal all along. Add me to all the hauntings and chaos and lunacy. I am so tired of these old jaws cracking about it. She went back into the house.

  For his own pain, Dr. Harvard decided to come down to the pier and see Melanie by accident in his mission of concern about Ulrich and Feeney at large on the barge. Others had gathered when word got out they might be in trouble or lost. Wren, Lewis, the dog Son, who frightened the greyhound back indoors, John Roman and the pale and butchered Egan gathered at the end of the pier. Then Sidney dragged down from his bait-store duties, making a show of anger about his lost trade. Nobody remembered who’d called him. He was off on a mad consumer’s ride, a revenge against lost time and missed women, fun, dice, fine liquor. His language was tougher, glibber than his old talk. Nobody knew quite
who he was now. He emulated Man Mortimer, who was changing gravely himself.

  They could see tiny specks of life across the lake but no boat. They spoke of the boat as if it were at the bottom of the lake and the old men bobbing and yammering in their life jackets. And what each had planned to read next meditation way up the reservoir near Yazoo—the Indian word for death ghost, was it? Sidney reminded Harvard of all the artistic and nautical effort he had put in the project, forget the pile of money, which nobody else here had, combined.

  “All for Miss Melanie too. We know that. A grand boat for a grand swank love, wasn’t it? And your poor wife dying at home all the while, smoking them cigarettes and building up her sad neglected ass with chocolate.”

  “You are scum,” said Harvard.

  All agreed the sheriff was a strange do-nothing about these troubles. That he was just another fraud of vocality like Bill Clinton. The law was fast cars with whip antennae racing around from one unsolved atrocity to another, screaming radios. Shield on the door ought to read Late, Lard-ass, Last to Know. But expert marksmen on small dogs ruffing in a driveway, or puffed actors in dinner theater, a fit of exhibitionism. Your taxes at work.

  Then they spoke of Melanie. “There’ll come the day when it’s right, Harvard. You’ll propose marriage, she’ll accept. The two of you were made for each other. Get married on the barge by Parson Egan here,” Lewis said.

  Egan watched the water east and west. He had not uttered a word, and he was ashamed of his carved face, the cross in stitched pieces.

  “If you don’t care old sheriff boy been a-tappin it,” said Sidney happily.

  “Please.” Harvard had found his own small voice at last.